Gorillas CLA election: wage decreases & vanishing rights. Vote NO
To our great suprise some Gorilla riders were texted by De Unie about the new Gorillas CLA (collective labour agreement). No-one had ever heard of these people and no-one knew of this process going on and all of the sudden we’re in an CLA election campaign. Here’s what you need to know.
Written by Sjerp van Wouden, Gorillas Rider in Oud-west.
If you need a primer on Dutch labour law, check out our post Primer on Dutch Labour law for a Dutch labour law 101. It discusses CLA / CAO collective labour agreement, how CLAs are made, unions, contracts, legal precedence, and has some pointers & examples.
Please bear with me as I’m very hurriedly writing these articles, while also having to work and life goes on. This is thus not an exhaustive article.
Is Gorillas above the law?
Gorillas presented itself as an friendly, respectfull company, priding itself on things like giving ‘the best and good looking apparel’ to riders. Anyone working at Gorillas knows this to be a bad joke. Like the ‘apparel’ breaking down in an instance (my sweater didn’t last two weeks) and the good-looking branding on bikes not even being water-resistant…. their image was shatted within months after Gorillas’ founding by the Riders’ anger in Germany over their treatment. From unsafe bikes, to heavy-handed management, to schedules being dictated instead of negotiated, to workers getting fired for no good reason, Gorillas is a bad employer.
Thuisbezorgd and Gorillas stared down massive protests in Germany. Thuisbezorgd sensibly capitulated and gave in to workers demands, allowing for operation to resume ‘as normal’. Flink followed suit, without a strike being necessary. The owners of Gorillas however hold themselves to be above critique. To them workers that demand fair treatment are an unacceptable usurpation of the natural order in the world. They consider themselves to be like the gods and that they can decide on anything through their ‘chain of command’.
Monthlong struggles and strikes followed in which Gorillas employed totalitarian (and illegal) methods of oppression, firing people who raised their voice. In the end Gorillas managed to wreck itself, it lost over half its market value, and the strike. The workers have vowed to continue the fight however. Gorillas in the meantime is a wounded beast. This is some of the context we should consider when we judge the merits of the the CLA. This is the company we work at, the company that we’re facing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my work and especially I like my colleagues. Gorillas however is a whole different story.
Why you should vote no to the Gorillas CLA
Here I’ll list a few reasons why this CLA is a really, really bad idea and against our interests.
This CLA is a travesty of democracy
Self-representation is key
We riders are perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves, indeed, it is absolutely necessary. We need to raise the issues that we face on a daily basis. We need to advance our own interests. This CLA does the opposite. We have had no say in it. It’s basically the Picnic E-Commerce CLA. The yellow union (a fake union) De Unie has not consulted Gorillas Riders. When I De Unie to demand clarification they admitted to having not spoken to us riders. In fact, they’d not even spoken to Picnic workers. They’d hired a third company to research issues faced by Picnic workers (or so they say) and took those ‘into consideration’ making this CLA. So vote no if you think you think this is a load of crap.
Understanding content and alternatives is key
How can we vote on things we don’t have the time to study? How can we vote on things if we don’t know what alternatives are? How can we vote if the ‘information campaign’ is more like a joint propaganda campaign by De Unie and Gorillas, that most colleagues couldn’t even participate in? What is a democracy worth if there’s no collective discussion in which we help eachother understand the issues and exchange viewpoints?
Roll-out of ‘election’ is a sham
De Unie claims to have send textmessages to everyone at Gorillas. Besides this being a clear violation of our privacy, this claim is a plain lie. Many colleagues never recieved the textmessage or lost it. The ‘election’ is dis-organised on purpose in order to more easily force through this CLA and give it the guise of legitimacy.
This CLA legitimizes a shady subversion of our rights
Gorillas is a supermarket, just like Picnic. When Gorillas started in february they admitted this and legally stated they were a supermarket. This means that the ‘supermarket cao’ specifically the Vereniging van Grootwinkelbedrijven in Levensmiddelen – CAO was in force. In this cao we get a ton of rights, like tons of bonusses. These are all signed away in this abomination called the E-Commerce CAO.
- The lowest wage in the supermarket-cao is €11,07. The lowest wage Gorillas pays now in this CLA is €10,69. That’s a straight up wage decrease! Don’t be fooled when they say you earn €11,54, that’s a lie.
- We used to get tons of ‘irregularities payments’. Check out the table. This actually runs up quite a sum.
- We used to have a right to healthy food, just about all of us, around dinner time. If they didn’t give that would be a €3,35 a day for us. Now that’s down to the legal basis, which basically means people working a full shift untill after 19:00. Something Gorillas doesn’t give by the way.
- We used to have a legal right to a negotiated schedule. Now depending on your management being good or bad guys, that’s imposed on us. At Oud-West management is OK, but other warehouses are not so lucky. This means you’re obligated to show up when they want. If you can’t (and dont show up)
- We used to have a right to sickness without waiting days. Gorillas has been rolling out waiting-days, currently 2, which means the first two days of sickness are unpaid.
- We used to have a right to worktime-shortening, called ADV, which in effect meant a blanket 8.1% bonus on all pay.
Now I’m sure you notice that I’m going back and forth between past and present tense and that’s correct. Because Gorillas has started using this CLA even before they we’re legally allowed to do it. It’s basically the Picnic company CLA. It’s not yet 100% clear to me yet but it seems that in April of 2021 Gorillas one-sidedly changed all contracts and with that started using the Picnic CLA, which was then a company specific CLA. That’s a legal impossibility of itself, but they did it anyway.
The Picnic CLA was made by De Unie and Picnic as a concious effort to subvert the rights we had under the supermarket CLA. The current vote is meant to legitimize this illegal subversion of our rights.
This CLA means lower wages
This CLA claims to give us a wage increase of 3%, but the inflation runs waaaaayy above 3% and will stay high. So that means we’re signing for a systematic wage decrease. Especially for us riders the inflation runs way higher then the official inflation. Because we spend relatively more on things heating, and gas is up 26%. We also spend more on food, whose prices are rocketing, and we spend relatively much on housing which is also rocketing. And check out the period: It’ll be like this for years to come!
It would be ridiculous in a labour market so tight, and with Flink Thuisbezorgd Zapp and Gorillas competing for workers, to not get a heavy, heavy wage increase. That De Unie got in their head to sign this really shows what side they’re on. Gorillas is paying €16,- for some riders because there’s a lack of workers. We at Radical Riders think a fair wage starts at €15,- and you bet that’s possible.
This CLA is full of void promises no-one intends to keep
This CLA contains a ton of clauses on issues like work safety, being instructed on how to work safely, etc etc. All riders know work safety is super important. All these crashes for example we could’ve avoided having when the bikes would just be up to snuff! The CLA supposedly contains guarantees on this; however, comparing it to the actual working situation on the ground shows it to be cynical non-sense. The work is not safe. Point. And De Unie, which is supposedly the one watching all over this and guarantor of these rights, has 0 members at Gorillas so they’re not going see it put in to practice.
The earlier Picnic CLA even had more rights regarding compensation payments when Gorillas would flound it’s requirements on safety, but that’s gone in the current CLA. So more decreases in workers rights also there.
What would make a ton of sense to put in this CLA for example: We want good bikes! And then a description of said bikes, the brakes and brake power, maintenance, etc.
What we need to do is come together as riders, raise the issues we face regarding safety, and fight for that. This CLA is more then just a hindrance: it whitewashes Gorillas sorry safety record.
Much more to say but out of time; how to vote.
I’m short on time and need to publish this, there’s so much more to say. Sorry. I need to finish this…
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Check out also this article (Dutch) on Picnic and their scams.